In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of digital media available online. Services, such as Apple's iTunes® for example, enable users to legally purchase and download music. Other services, such as Yahoo!® Music Unlimited and RealNetwork's Rhapsody®, provide access to millions of songs for a monthly subscription fee. YouTube® provides users access to video media. As a result, media items have become much more accessible to consumers worldwide. Due to the large amount of the accessible digital media, recommendation technologies are emerging as an important enabler to assist users in identifying and navigating large databases of available media. Recommendations are useful to help users identify and select media items of interest for usage and/or play.
Recommendations may be programmatically-generated by a company based on the user's predefined preferences and/or profiles. Recommendations also may be provided by other users. Particularly, the users may be peers on a social network. As such, the social network allows for the exchange of media item recommendations among the users. Typically, the users on the social network have some type of relationship. For example, the users may be friends, acquaintances, or members of a defined group or community. Because of these relationships, the users may have similar traits, profiles, likes and dislikes, and/or media item preferences.
Therefore, the social network provides an opportunity to utilize the users' relationships and similarities to develop and strengthen the interaction between the users not only with respect to the media items, but also with respect to the users personally. This opportunity may be further utilized by being able to include personal information and annotations in the media item recommendation. This would further develop and strengthen the user interaction, which would promote the continued use of the social network for media item recommendations and the acquisition and playing of the media items recommended.
Current media item recommendation applications provide for media item recommendations that identify the media item being recommended and provide some basic information about the media item being recommended. This information may be the name of the recommender, the title of the media item, the name of the artist, and information concerning certain characteristic information of the media item. However, current media item recommendation applications do not provide a way to include personal information and annotations in media item recommendations. Therefore a need exists for a media item recommendation message that includes personal information and annotations with the media item recommendation.